This invention relates to shipping and storage pallets and more particularly to pallets having a plastic construction.
Pallets have traditionally been formed of wood. Wood pallet however have many disadvantages. For example, they are subject to breakage and thus are not reusable over an extended period of time. They also take up a considerable amount of valuable floor space in the warehouse when they are not in use. They are also difficult to maintain in a sanitary condition, thus limiting their usability in applications where sanitation is important, such for example as in food handling applications. In an effort to solve some of the problems associated with wood pallets, plastic pallets have been employed with some degree of success. In one generally successful form of plastic pallet design, a twin sheet construction has been used in which upper and lower plastic sheets are formed in separate molding operations and the two sheets are then selectably fused or knitted together in a suitable press to form a reinforced double wall structure. Whereas these twin sheet plastic pallets are generally satisfactory, when they are stored in a rack in a loaded condition, the plastic material of the pallet may tend to creep over a period of time with the result that the platform structure of the pallet may warp to an extent that the pallet becomes disengaged from the rack support members and the pallet, with its load, falls out of the rack. The pallet warpage also creates problems with respect to automatic retrieval systems which depend for their successful operation on the pallet maintaining an essentially unwarped configuration. Attempts have been made to avoid these warpage problems in plastic pallets by arranging some manner of stiffening insert assembly in association with the plastic main body of the pallet, but these prior art stiffening arrangements have tended to be unduly complicated and unduly expensive.